"Mind!" exclaimed Bobby. "I never minded it so much in my life as I do now. The _Bulletin_ must win. I'm bound that it shall win! If we come out ahead in our fight against Stone I'll get all my advertising back, and I'll keep my circulation, which makes advertising rates."

The telephone bell rang in the study adjoining the dining-room, and Bobby, who had been more or less distrait all evening, half rose from his chair. In a moment more the maid informed them that the call was for Mr. Burnit. In the study they could hear his voice, excited and exultant. He returned as delighted as a school-boy.

"Now I can tell you something," he announced. "Within five minutes the _Bulletin_ will have exclusive extras on the street, announcing that the legislature has just appointed a committee to investigate munic.i.p.al affairs throughout the state. That means this town. I have spent ten thousand dollars in lobbying that measure through, and charged it all to improvements' on the _Bulletin_. Sounds like I had joined the ranks of the 'boodlers,' don't it? Well, I don't give a cooky for ethics so long as I know I'm right. I'd have been a simp, as Biff Bates calls it, to go among that crowd of hungry law jugglers with kind words and the ten commandments. I'm not using crossbows against cannon, and as a result I'm winning. I got my measure through, and now I think we'll put Stone and his crew of freebooters on the grill, with some extra-hot coals for my friend De Graff and the other saintly sinners who have been playing into Stone's hands. I have been working a year for this, and the entire politics of this town, with wide-reaching results in the state, is disrupted."

"You selfish boy," chided Aunt Constance. "You have been here with us for more than an hour, expecting this all the time, and have not breathed one word of it to us. Don't you trust anybody any more?"

"Oh, yes," replied Bobby easily; "but only when it is necessary."

Agnes smiled across at him in calm content. She had but very little to say now. She was in that blissful happiness that comes to any woman when the man most in her mind is reaping his meed of success from a long and hard-fought battle.

"Spoken like your father, Bobby," laughed Uncle Dan. "You're coming to look more and more like him every day. You talk like him and act like him. You have the same snap of your jaws. Your father, however, never dabbled in politics. He always despised it, and I see you're bound to be knee-deep in it."

"My father would have succeeded in politics," said Bobby confidently, "as he succeeded in everything else, after he once got started. I have his confession in writing, however, that he made a few fool mistakes himself along at first. As for politics, I _am_ in it knee-deep, and I'm going to elect my own slate next fall."

"Another reform party, of course," suggested Uncle Dan with a smile.

"Not for Bobby," replied that decided young gentleman. "I am forming an affiliation with Cal Lewis."

"Cal Lewis!" exclaimed Uncle Dan aghast. Then he closed his eyes and laughed softly. "As notorious in his way as Sam Stone himself. Why, Bobby, that's fighting fire with gasolene."

"It's setting a thief to catch a thief. You must remember that for fifteen years Cal hasn't had any of the pie except in a minor way, and all this time he's been fighting Stone tooth and toe-nail. The late reform movement, which failed so lamentably to carry out its gaudy promises after it had won, left him entirely out of its calculations, and Lewis actually joined with Stone in overturning it. I propose to use Lewis' knowledge of political machinery, but in my own way. As a matter of fact, I have already engaged him and put him on salary; a good, stiff one, too. His business is to organize my political machine. I'm going to have a slate of clean men, who will not only conduct the business of this county and city with probity but with discretion, and I do not mind telling you that my candidate for mayor is Chalmers."

Agnes gave a little cry of delight, and even Aunt Constance clapped her hands lightly, for Chalmers, a young lawyer of excellent social connections, was a prime favorite with the Ellistons, and in the business he had transacted for the Burnit estate Bobby had found in him sterling qualities.

"Chalmers is a good man," agreed Uncle Dan, "though he is young, and practically without political influence; but, if you can make him mayor, I predict a brilliant political future for him."

"He will have it," said Bobby confidently, "for I intend to make him the attorney for the investigating committee, and through his work I expect to have not less than a hundred thousand dollars of stolen money turned back into the city and county treasuries."

As Bobby announced this he rose mechanically, and, still absorbed in the details of his big fight, walked out into the hall. It was not until he had his coat on and his hat in his hand that he came to himself; and with the deepest confusion found that he had been about to walk out without making any adieus whatever.

"Why, where are you going?" inquired Agnes, as he came back into the drawing-room.

He laughed sheepishly.

"Why," he explained, "ever since I received that telephone message I have been seeing before me the _Bulletin_ extra that they are throwing on the street right now, and I forgot everything else. I'll simply have to go down and hold a copy of it in my hands."

"You're just a big boy," laughed Aunt Constance. "Will you ever grow up?"

"I hope not," declared Agnes, and taking his arm she strolled with him to the door in perfect peace and confidence.

CHAPTER XXVI

MR. STONE LEAVES BOBBY A PARTING COMMISSION AND A LEFT-HANDED BLESSING

It looked good to Bobby, that late extra of the _Bulletin_, and the force that he had kept on duty to get it out greeted him, as he walked through the office, with a running fire of comment and congratulation that was almost like applause. He had bought a copy on the street as he came in, and as he spread it out there came upon him a thrill of realization that this ought to be the beginning of the end.

It was. The fact that Bobby, through the _Bulletin_, had forced this action, made him a power to be reckoned with; and straws, whole bales of them, began to show which way the wind was blowing.

One morning a delegation headed by the Reverend Doctor Larynx waited upon him. The Reverend Doctor was a minister of great ingenuity and force, who sought the salvation of souls through such vital topics as Shall Men Go Coatless in Summer? The Justice of Three-Cent Car Fares, and The Billboards Must Go. All public questions, civic, state or national, were thoroughly thrashed out in the pulpit of the Reverend Larynx, and turned adrift with the seal of his condemnation or approval duly fixed upon them; and he managed to get his name and picture in the papers almost as often as the man who took eighty-seven bottles of Elixo and still survived. With him were four thoroughly respectable men of business, two of whom wore side-whiskers and the other two of whom wore white bow-ties.

"Fine business, Mr. Burnit," said the Reverend Doctor Larynx in a loud, hearty voice, advancing with three strides and clasping Bobby's hand in a vise-like grip; for he was a red-blooded minister, was the Reverend Doctor Larynx, and he believed in getting down among the "pee-pul." "The _Bulletin_ has proved itself a mighty fine engine of reform, and the reputable citizens of this munic.i.p.ality now see a ray of hope before them."

"I'm afraid that the reputable citizens," ventured Bobby, "have no one but themselves to blame for their past hopeless condition. They're too selfish to vote."

"You have hit the nail on the head," declaimed the Reverend Larynx with a loud, hearty laugh, "but the _Bulletin_ will rouse them to a sense of duty. Last night, Mr. Burnit, the Utopian Club was formed with an initial membership of over seventy, and it selected a candidate for mayor of whom the _Bulletin_ is bound to approve. Shake hands with Mr. Freedom, the Utopian Club's candidate for mayor, Mr.

Burnit."

Bobby shook hands with Mr. Freedom quite nicely, and studied him curiously.

He was one of the two who wore side-whiskers and a habitual Prince Albert, and he displayed a phenomenal length from lower lip to chin, which, by reason of his extremely high and narrow forehead, gave his features the appearance of being grouped in tiny spots somewhere near the center of a long, yellow cylinder. Mr. Freedom, he afterward ascertained, was a respectable singing-teacher.

"Professor Freedom," went on the Reverend Doctor Larynx, still loudly and heartily, "has the time to devote to this office, as well as the ideal qualifications. He has no vices whatever. He does not even smoke nor use tobacco in any form, and under his regime the saloons of this town would be turned into vacant store-rooms, if there are laws to make possible such action."

"I do not want the saloons put out of business," declared Bobby. "I merely want them vacated at twelve every night, without exception."

When Doctor Larynx and his delegation went away in wrath the leader was already preparing his sermon upon The Iniquity of the Sons of Rich Fathers.

On the following day a delegation from the business men's club waited upon him. The business men's club wanted a business administration.

This crowd Bobby handled differently. Upon his desk, tabulated in advance against just such an emergency, he had statistics concerning all the business men's administrations that had been tried in various cities, and he submitted this statement without argument. It needed none.

"Politics is in itself a distinct business," he explained. "You would not one of you take up the duties of a surveyor without previous training. The only trouble is that there are no restrictions placed upon politicians. I propose to use them, but to regulate them."

He did not convert the delegation by this one interview, but he did by cultivating these men and others of their kind separately. He ate luncheons and dinners with them at the Traders' Club, played billiards with them, smoked and talked with them; and the burden of his talk was Chalmers. When he finally got ready for his campaign the business men were with him unanimously, at least outwardly. Inwardly, there were reservations, for the matter of special privileges was one to be very gravely considered; and special privileges, at a price not entirely prohibitive, was the bulwark of Stone's regime.

"But the Stone regime," Bobby advised them, coming brutally to the point and telling them what he knew of their own affairs and Stone's, "is about to come to an end. The handwriting is on the wall, and you might just as well climb into the band wagon, for at last I have the public on my side."

At last he had. For a solid year he had been trying to understand the peculiar apathy of the public, and he did not understand it yet. They seemed to like Stone and to look upon his wholesale corruption as a joke; but by constant hammering, by showing the unredeemable cussedness of Stone and his crowd, he had produced some impression--an impression that, alas! was of the surface only--until the investigating committee began its sessions. When it became understood, however, that certain of the thieves might actually be sent to the penitentiary, then who so loud in their denunciation as the public?

Why, Stone had robbed them right and left; why, Stone was an enemy to mankind; why, Stone and all his friends were monsters whom it were a good and a holy thing to skewer and flay and cast into everlasting brimstone!

Facts were uncovered that set the entire city in turmoil. More than fifty men who had never been born had been carried upon the city and county pay-rolls, and half of their salaries went directly into Stone's pocket, the other half going to the men who conducted this paying enterprise. Contracts for city paving and other improvements were let to favored bidders at an enormous figure, and Stone personally had one-fourth of the huge profits on "scamped" work, another fourth going to those who arranged the details and did the collecting. Innumerable instances of this sort were brought out; but the biggest scandal of all, in that it involved men who should have been una.s.sailable, was that of the banks. The relentless probe brought out the fact that all city and county funds had been distributed among four banks, the deposits yielding no revenue whatever to either commonwealth. These funds, however, had paid privately two per cent.

interest, and this interest was paid in cash, in sealed envelopes, to the city and county auditors and treasurers, who took the envelopes unbroken to Stone for distribution. The amounts thus diverted from the proper channels totaled to an enormous figure, and, as this money was the most direct and approachable, Chalmers, who had the interesting role of inquisitor, set out to get it. The officials who had been longest at the crib, grown incautious were now men of property, and by the use of red-hot pincers Chalmers was able to restore nearly sixty thousand dollars of stolen money, with the possibility of more in sight.

It was upon the heels of this that Chalmers' candidacy for mayor was announced, and the manner in which the Stone machine dropped to pieces was laughable. Chalmers, and the entire slate so carefully prepared by Bobby in conjunction with the shrewd old fox, Cal Lewis, won by a majority so overwhelming as to be almost unanimous. Immediately upon Chalmers' election heads began to drop, and the first to go was Cooley, chief of police, in whom, four years later, Bobby recognized the driver of his ice wagon. Coincident with the election came well-founded rumors of grand jury indictments. Two of Stone's closest and busiest lieutenants, who were most in danger of being presented with nice new suits of striped clothing, quietly converted their entire property into cash and then just as quietly slipped away to Honduras.

Late one afternoon, as Bobby sat alone in his room in the almost deserted _Bulletin_ building, so worried over his business affairs that he had no time for elation over his political and personal triumphs, the door opened and Stone stood before him. The pouches under Stone's eyes were heavier and darker, his cheeks drooped flabbily and he seemed to have fallen away inside his clothes, but upon his face there sat the same stern impa.s.siveness. Bobby instantly rose, having good cause to want to be well planted upon his feet with this man near him. Stone carefully closed the door behind him and advanced to the other side of Bobby's desk.

"Well, you win," he said huskily.

Bobby drew a long breath.

"It has cost me a lot of money, Mr. Stone. It has left me almost flat broke--but I got you."

"I give you credit," admitted Stone. "I didn't think anybody could do it, least of all a kid; but you got me and you got me good. It's been a hard fight for all of us, I guess. I'm a little run down," and he hesitated curiously; "my doctor says I got to take an ocean trip." He suddenly blazed out: "d.a.m.n it, you might as well be told! I'm running away!"